solidgone

I've been using Firefox for a long time, and liked it a lot. Recently that long honey moon period started to wane. Firefox 2.x has some pretty annoying performance and memory management issues, regularly chewing up 700-800Mb of memory (on a 1Gb machine), and hitting 90-100% CPU resource. Admittedly I have 4-5 windows open, with 10-20 tabs in each, and a bunch of extensions installed, so I run it hard, but none the less, the problems are there. I was also sick of fan-boys explaining away issues (even refusing to admit there were problems), with comments like "it's the extensions, duuude", or "what do you expect with so many windows, duuude". Neither of these are reasons for chewing up all resources on a machine. Opera was starting to look mighty shiny.

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Here's how to hook up a Verizon ActionTec wireless router behind a Smoothwall firewall; actually this should work for getting the ActionTec to work behind pretty much any firewall. The ActionTec menu structure is not well described, and so this took a while to figure out -- and when I did it was ridiculously easy.

There were two keys in getting this to work. One was to recognize that the ActionTec and the Smoothwall firewall needed to be on different sub-nets. (Although I admit to not understanding why this is the case.) The second was to realize that the the only settings you need to change on the ActionTec are under "Network (Home/Office)" -- you do not need to change the "Broadband Connection Ethernet/Coax" settings, despite what the ActionTec error message might indicate.

1. Set the firewall's IP to something other than the usual 192.168.1.x; I used 192.168.1.2 for example. I also set the firewall to act as a DCHP server, with a range of 192.168.2.50-99 -- this is not required, but makes it easier to setup the ActionTec.
2. On the ActionTec under My Network->Network Connections, goto the "Network (Home/Office)" settings and change the IP address to a different sub-net; I used 192.168.1.1.
3. On the same settings page mid-way down, enter the DNS Server using the IP of your Smoothwall (in my case that was 192.168.2.1).
4. Not required, but you likely want to IP addresses automatically assigned on your LAN, so change "IP Address Distribution" to "DHCP Server" and specify a range of something like 192.168.1.50-99.

That's it. Hope that helps.

This is Loïc Jean Albert, inventor of the wing-suit, jumping off a mountain. As you do.

A jQuery plugin that creates a table of contents for all header elements within the parent DOM element provided. (Based on original jqPageContent by Dimitri Spassov.)

By default, jqTOC produces a fixed, floating div box with the title "Content", in the top right of the browser window. When the box is clicked a new div will display a list of all H1, H2, H3 elements within scope of the parameter element. Each TOC element is a clickable link to the title in the document.

Start and end heading levels can be specified. All heading levels 1, 2, 3, is the default.

• Check out the demo TOC.
• Download the javascript and the CSS.

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Save this widget in either the plugins or the systemplugins directory to display a list of all blogs in the sidebar. Make sure you remove the ".txt" extension -- it needs to be simply ".php".

28-Aug-06: Updated .htaccess code.

I was looking for a way to allow multiple blogs sharing the same installation. The setup I was looking for needed to have:

1. The blog software installed in it's own directory. Cluttering the root up with files is simply not a good idea. Separation of Concerns is a good thing at all levels.
2. Have users access their blogs using nice memorable URL, and to have links within the blog use a clean URL format. Something like username.domain.com is friendly. This is not friendly: username.blogs.domain.com.
3. I wanted to use other software on this domain, so I did not want to use or set a document root. Doing this pretty much prevents any other software being installed at the root level on that domain.

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Since a picture paints a thousand words, stands to reason that 200 words would be a pretty crappy picture. Not so. Imagine standing, camera in hand, but being so struck by the moment that you forgot to click. Whoops, no photograph. Duh. Now imagine being able to photograph that image with just 200 words. These words are better than the picture missed.